I was very surprised to see that you can assign
QuickTime movies to objects as textures that animate in your
animations. In other words, you can experience a fly-thru
of your home renovation project while something on the flat-screen
television is playing -- and playing as smoothly as you would
experience it in reality or on your computer. The results
are impressive. (see image 05) You can also assign photos
as textures to objects such as picture frames, televisions
or
walls. This makes the program suitable, very suitable actually,
for exhibit, gallery or museum layout design.

05
- Finished QuickTime Flyby Animation Movie

Future Improvements

I'm not sure about the UK home remodeling market,
but here in the United States it has been booming for years,
and shows no sign of slowing down. Before we comment on specific
shortcomings Microspot should be applauded for recognizing
the giant vacancy
in consumer-level 3D design software on the Macintosh. For
that they deserve huge kudos. Yet at the same time, it is
a real pity that this product is
just
focused
on "interiors"
because if you are serious about that room addition off the
back of your house, you probably want to visualize how it
looks too -- from the outside of your house. If you ask me,
that is another Microspot product just begging to be made.

Now onto what can be better about this application.
For starters, there are two many different sizes for palettes,
which makes organizing them on the screen very difficult.
The general interface itself is quite nice and will be familar
to Adobe users. That's all good. But a little work in this
department will go a long way. Additionally, the animation
palettes will seem naturally very foreign to most users so
we'd like to see some included QuickTime instructional movies
that cover this territory.

Microspot Interiors doesn't ship with a printed
manual. That's okay because its built-in PDF based manual
could be printed out and comes with lots of screen shots.
However, as stated previously many times on this site, developers
have little excuse for not providing at least a few introductory
QuickTime instructional animations with the software package.
They do have one overview QuickTime on the site but it doesn't
cover nearly enough and it doesn't touch on more complicated
procedures such as generating an animation. More of these
would be of great aid to newbies mostly who might get incredibly
frustrated with certain operations.

Recommendations
and Final Comments

If you get inspired from HGTV and all those
makeover home design programs but can't afford to hire a
professional architect or interior designer, then by all
means grab a copy of Microspot Interiors and start creating
and dreaming. Microspot
Interiors 3.6 is relatively easy
to use for an application of this type and on the Mac OS
X platform it is in a class literally all by itself.

If you
are a related professional such as a set designer, exhibit
designer, gallery designer or similar, and you haven't
used a 3D design program yet, Microspot Interiors might just
be
the perfect onramp into 3d design work. Coupled with Modeler
you should be able to handle just about any interior situation.
We also recommend this application for children interested
in architecture and design. It is easy enough for them to
jump right in, yet advanced enough to keep them busy for
hours.

Again, Microspot Interiors is an interior-focused
application. Contractors and remodelers who need the whole
house should look elsewhere, unfortunately. But for everyone
else who just need basics and the inside, this program will
please you, especially as you master it over time. --- Anthony
Frausto-Robledo, Editor-in-Chief. Published
14 June 2006.